Kominicki: The Skippy peanut butter back story

Spam agreed to buy Skippy last week in a deal that brings together two of America’s most venerated lunchtime treats.

The $700 million acquisition by Hormel Foods allows the firm to expand what it calls its “non-meat protein” line while broadening its reach overseas, notably in China, where Skippy – sold under the name Four Seasons Treasure – is the top-selling brand. Hormel also gets the coveted peanutbutter.com url.

There’s a Long Island connection, so hang with me.

Joseph Rosefield, a California food executive, invented modern peanut butter in 1923. There were already dozens of peanut butter brands by then, but they all suffered from the fact that the oil separated from what the industry calls the “grit” after manufacturing. Rosefield’s patented improvement was to add vegetable shortening to the recipe, allowing the mix to be churned into a spread so smooth that the homogenization was guaranteed for a year.

Rosefield initially licensed the process to the makers of Peter Pan peanut butter, but he launched his own brand, which he named Skippy, etymology unclear, in 1933.

Rosefield’s trademark was almost immediately challenged by New Yorker Percy Crosby, creator of the Skippy Skinner comic strip, and the two sides took to the courts for what became a decades-long legal battle.

Though now largely forgotten, the Skippy Skinner strip was the “Dennis the Menace” of its day, spawning books, toys and two movies starring a young Jackie Cooper, the first of which was nominated for four Academy Awards. The strip also inspired such future cartoonists as Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” and Walt Kelly of “Pogo” fame.

Crosby was also a creative force outside the funny pages, writing poetry and essay collections, staging international exhibitions of his drawings and paintings and penning illustrations for pals at The New Yorker. He held court regularly at the Seymour Hotel on 45th Street, where he lived, dining with such celebrities as Jerome Kern, Ring Lardner and John Barrymore.

(Another Seymour resident, the acclaimed British actor Charles Warner, hanged himself at the hotel, leaving behind two checks: one, for $27, to cover funeral expenses, the second, for $150, to cover his bar bill.)

Alas, Crosby’s political convictions – and heavy drinking – began to undo the Skippy juggernaut in the late 1930s. It began with vitriolic letters to the New York newspapers that tarred President Franklin Roosevelt as a power-hungry tyrant and closet communist. Others lambasted FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and railed against Al Capone.

Crosby’s political and social rants also began creeping into, then dominating, the Skippy strip, which publications like Life magazine soon dropped.

The political polemics hurt Crosby’s book sales as well, forcing him to self-publish his autobiography and the eight rodomontades that followed, each of which lost money.

Then came a giant IRS judgment against his holding company, Skippy Inc., which required Crosby to sell off his 1,500-acre Virginia estate. His wife fled with the couple’s four young children, whom he would never see again.

Though left nearly penniless by tax claims, legal fees and alimony, Crosby was unable to agree on a new contract with his syndicator, King Features, and the Skippy strip ceased publication on Dec. 8, 1945, the artist’s 54th birthday.

Rosefield, the Skippy peanut butter maker, won full trademark rights to the name three years later, although Crosby’s heirs would fight the ruling into the new century.

Crosby attempted suicide in 1948 and was ordered into Bellevue Hospital. The following year, he was transferred to the psychiatric hospital at King’s Park, where he remained for the last 16 years of his life, sketching, painting and scrawling political shindies the whole time.

He suffered a heart attack in 1964 and died after several months in a coma. Again, the date was Dec. 8, this time the artist’s 73rd birthday.

Crosby, a U.S. Army captain during World War I, is buried at the Long Island National Cemetery in Melville, Section R, Site 2816.

One comment

To say that the etymology of the Skippy name for Rosefield’s peanut butter is not clear, as you do, contradicts almost everything else that is in your article. Surely you would not say the same if I were to come out with a product called, say, “Dilbert,” and the name was printed on a background of a sea of office cubicles. Rosefield even wrote the name on the peanut butter jar as if it were done with a paint brush on a stockade fence, exactly the way the Skippy character scrawled his messages in the comic script. It is really very difficult to imagine a more obvious case of copyright infringement. One hardly even has to read your article between the lines to conclude that Percy Crosby was the victim of some very powerful enemies, and we’re not talking about Demon Rum, and his heirs remain victims to the present day.